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The prime minister must curry favour with Canadian aboriginals if his resource agenda is to succeed. Why then is he so obdurate?
Historically, the Canadian government has catered to aboriginals only when it needed them. It needs them now. Specifically, Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs First Nations on side if his government is to push through its ambitious resource development plans and reap the requisite political awards.
British Columbia’s native communities have the capacity to tie up — perhaps indefinitely — Harper’s proposed oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast. They have promised to do just that. Mining development in northern Ontario’s so-called ring of fire can take place only if First Nations there agree.
So far, the Ontario government has been carrying out the ring-of-fire negotiations. But Ottawa too wants those minerals developed and the federal government’s approach to native people is bound to have an effect on any final deal.
Whether Harper fully understands all of this is unclear. He’s reputed to be a master tactician. But with a few exceptions, the prime minister has been remarkably tone deaf about Indian, Métis and Inuit issues.
He has offended the mainstream aboriginal organizations, first by limiting their core funding and then by bypassing them altogether in his planned reforms to the Indian Act.
For the Inuit of the Eastern Arctic, global warming is a real and immediate threat. Yet in Conservative-dominated Ottawa, climate change is a non-issue.
True, Harper has apologized on behalf of former governments for any abuses suffered by aboriginal children in Canada’s now defunct residential school system. True also that after three years of bitter opposition, his government signed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
But apologies and UN declarations are cheap. The aboriginal leadership — and the aboriginal grassroots — want much, much more. For the Harper Conservatives, all of this is a bitter pill to swallow.
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